Jessica received two letters from Irish Water on Friday addressed to her deceased husband, which read 'Alan Montague RIP'.

Ms Montague posted a photo of the letter on Facebook on Friday morning with the caption: 'This morning's post. Two letters from IW addressed to my deceased husband. Nearly 6 years dead and you dare to put that on a letter. No, I will not be contacting you to clarify your error.'

She said her husband died in June 2009 but Irish Water sent a bill addressed to his name and another letter asking to clarify the household details.

'I can appreciate someone making a clerical or database error', said Jessica 'but someone had to input the data and put in the words RIP after my husband's name. I don't know why they would deliberately do that.

It doesn't make sense for a new utility to send a bill to someone who died several years ago.'

The first batch of Irish Water bills were delivered to homes across the country on Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for Irish Water said: 'Irish water will be sending bills to 1.5 million customers over the coming eight weeks.

"It's a significant task and we expect to face challenges where we have incomplete customer information, where customers have not yet registered or where customer information needs to be updated.

"We totally understand and apologise for upset caused by incorrect customer information, and our contact centre staff are ready to accept customer registrations or to correct any data inaccuracies quickly so that information is correct for future billing cycles.'